Feds! The deadly battle with government lawmen, always a possibility, always the threat out there waiting. Was it here now? Elvis searched the sky, clutching his Uzi to his chest, but he saw no black helicopters.
“Easy, boys,” Captain Bob called to his line of men, and held his Colt.45 automatic up in the air to signal they should stand where they were. The rest of them all carried Uzis adapted to fire only one shot at a time, to make them legal, which of course would be unadapted in a flat second once Armageddon started, but Captain Bob, as the leader, was the only one with a side arm.
“I see it!” Jack Ray called, and then they all saw it. A white utility vehicle, it was, looked foreign, moving along the road toward the curve where they themselves had turned off into the glades not five minutes ago.
Captain Bob gestured downward with the.45, and they all crouched, twenty-nine men in camouflage uniforms with greasepaint and Off! on their faces. In a minute, the car would go around that curve and on out of sight.
And then it happened, astonishingly. Instead of slowing, the car abruptly speeded up, and its right front door opened, on the side away from the CRDF, and a man fell or jumped out of it.
The car yawed this way and that, brakes on hard, tires slipping on the muddy road, and the near side rear door opened and another man came rolling out, and this one was clutching a rifle in vertical position against his chest, exactly the way Captain Bob had taught the CRDF to do, if they ever had to bail out of something big, moving fast.
The car slewed around, the first man started to his feet as though to run off into the glades, and damn if the second man didn’t come up on one knee, aim, and shoot the first man in the back. Whang! Down he went; son of a bitch!
And tried to get up. They could see him struggle as the man with the rifle got up and walked toward him and the white car finally came to a stop, and the driver stuck his head out to yell something to the shooter.
Captain Bob started yelling then, too: “Hey! Hold on there! You men stop there!”
But they couldn’t hear him, or they were concentrating too much to pay attention, so the whole CRDF watched the rifleman kick the man he’d shot to roll him down into the water, and then take aim to shoot him again up close.
That was when Captain Bob fired his side arm into the air to attract their attention.
Which it did. The driver of the car and the rifleman both turned to stare at the crouching CRDF, and then, quick as a wink, the rifleman whipped up his rifle and fired at them!
A fella named Hoby that had bad teeth and was three guys to Elvis’s left flopped backward like a cut line of wash. Just back and down.
The truth is, if it wasn’t for the CRDF, Elvis personally would have panicked at that point and gone running like a greyhound into the glades. But there was the CRDF, and he was part of it, and he stuck.
“Two lines!” called Captain Bob while the rifleman fired again and a fella named Floyd did the back-flop thing, and the remaining twenty-six troopers, with Captain Bob tall at their right end, quickly formed into two broad lines facing the foe. The front rank dropped to one knee.
“Front rank!” yelled Captain Bob as the rifleman suddenly took off running toward the car. “The vehicle!”
Which meant the rear rank, which included Elvis, was to take out the rifleman. Okay. Not much leading at this distance. Hands steady as a rock.
“Fire!”
Thirteen bullets went into the driver and thirteen bullets went into the rifleman.
The CRDF’s first military engagement. They’d taken two casualties out of a force of twenty-nine, and the opposing force was completely wiped out. As far as Elvis Clagg was concerned, the CRDF had just kicked ass.
4
“Dear,” said Alice Prester Young, “do we know a Daniel Parmitt?”
Jack Young looked up from his Wall Street Journal to smile across the breakfast table at his bride. “Who, dear?”
“Parmitt, Daniel Parmitt. It says here he’s staying at the Breakers.”
“It says where?”
“In the Herald.”
Jack Young’s smile was the soul of patience. “Dear,” he said, “why is Mr. Parmitt in the Herald?”
“Because he was shot. Not expected to live.”
“Shot!” Jack’s surprise was genuine. “Why would we know anybody that was shot?”
“Well, it says he’s staying at the Breakers, so I’m wondering if he’s here for the ball.”
“Well, if he’s been shot,” Jack said, “he isn’t likely to come to the ball.”
“No, dear, but I was just wondering.”
“If we knew him,” Jack said.
“Yes, dear,” she said, although by now she had realized that wasn’t the actual question at all. It wasn’t did they know this Daniel Parmitt, it was did she know him. Jack wouldn’t be likely to know anybody from her past, would he?
This was her first season at the beach as Alice Prester Young, after having been Alice Prester Habib forever. Eleven years; hard to believe. Before that, somebody else, before that, somebody else, who even remembers anymore?
It was very nice to bring an attractive new husband to the beach for the season, introduce him around, let the biddies turn green with envy. And it was especially nice to know that one could still look all right on the arm of such a husband. One didn’t look exactly like a girl anymore, but one certainly did look all right.
Particularly the body. Between the doctors and the dietitians and the personal trainers, it was possible, though not easy, to keep a hard youthful body forever, to offer an attentive young husband something interesting and responsive in bed. The face could be kept smooth and attractive, but never quite exactly girlish. The softnesses and roundnesses of youth can never be recaptured on the face, so the best you can hope for in that department is angular, slightly hollow, good looks, more striking than beautiful. But who could complain? At sixty-seven, to have a striking face above the body of a twenty-year-old wasn’t bad. And a twenty-six-year-old brand-new husband.
Why had she stayed so long with Habib?
Jack broke into her thoughts by saying, “Somebody shot this fellow at the Breakers?”
“No, dear, he’s staying at the Breakers. They kidnapped him—”
“What!”
“—and took him into the Everglades and shot him there.”
“Who? Why?”
“Apparently it was a case of mistaken identity. They were professional killers, and whoever they were supposed to kill they took this man Parmitt by mistake.”
“Now, that’s what I call bad luck,” Jack said, and laughed. “And besides that, he doesn’t get to go to the ball.”
“Oh, that reminds me, the auction,” she said. “Dear, would you be a dear?”
“Of course,” he said. He’d been just as attentive when he’d been an insurance company claims adjuster and they’d met after that silly automobile accident in Short Hills. Now, his bright blue eyes eager, he said, “What do you need, dear?”
“My albums,” she said. “Not last year’s, but the two years before that.”
“Coming up,” he said. He rose, smiled, folded his Journal, put it on the chair, and went off to her study, leaving her in the cool and quiet breakfast room, all pink and gold, with its view over the sea grape at the limitless ocean.
In a minute he was back with the two albums she’d asked for, both big thick volumes with padded pastel covers and glassine sheets within, inside which, every year, Alice inserted all photos and social-page stories involving her. Which meant, naturally, that most of the other important Beachers would also be seen in the various photos.